Pure Blood_ A Nocturne City Novel - Caitlin Kittredge [81]
It was well past normal visiting hours, but at the brandishment of my badge, a disgruntled guard buzzed me in. The county jail was staffed by the Las Rojas Sheriff’s Office, not the department of corrections, and I didn’t blame them for being surly. The jail sat well outside downtown, on a desolate strip of shale next to the Vortiger River. It had been a brewery owned by the Vortiger family, Germans who followed our founding father Jeremiah Chopin west from St. Louis in the early days of expansion.
The river named after the Vortigers had survived. Their brewery had not, and the city had seized it and decided the logical course would be to turn it into a jail. Maybe they thought the lager-tinged fumes would keep the prisoners calm.
“Who are you here to see, Detective?” said the deputy inside the cage that controlled the ancient iron gates barring the bowels of the jail. Being inside the building always reminded me vaguely of Alcatraz, or Sing-Sing—an old-style sense of punishment, not rehabilitation.
“Arthur Samuelson,” I said. She raised a thick black eyebrow. Her face was squashed, like a bright-eyed bulldog’s.
“Sir Samael,” she intoned sarcastically. “He’ll be thrilled. Gun and any metallic objects stay outside the bars.”
I put everything that could be used as a shank in the plastic basket she furnished me and accepted the claim chit. A sickly buzzer sounded far off, and the gate creaked open.
“Make sure you wash your hands after,” said the deputy, going back to her magazine.
I walked down the brick-lined hall to the steel door of the interrogation room. The jail was arranged in a cellular construction, with civilian hallways on one side, interrogation and meeting rooms in the center, and the main cell block on the other side.
Inside, I took a seat and waited seven minutes, by the ancient wall clock, for Samael to be brought in.
He was thinner than I remembered now that he was wearing a loose shirt, his hair free of gel and hanging in his eyes. His posture sagged as the guard chained his shackles to the ring in the floor, but his eyes were the same twin high beams I remembered.
“How’s your head?” he asked me after the deputy had shut the door.
“How’s jail?” I met him smirk for smirk. In normal light, and the silence of the interrogation room, he wasn’t even close to some of the nightmarish things that showed up behind my eyes after dark. It also helped that he wasn’t giving me a concussion and throwing me in a cage.
“Fine,” he said smoothly. “People are easy to control when they’re already locked up.”
“You like control,” I stated, and he didn’t take it as a question, just smiled like I’d asked if he wanted a candy bar.
“I think you figured that out already, pretty girl,” he said. The hypnotic cadence just seemed overblown, matched with his puke-green county jumpsuit.
“Homicide,” I said. Samael blinked.
“Beg pardon?”
“I’m a homicide detective,” I said. “Call me anything except ‘Detective’ or ‘ma’am’ again and I’ll put your smug face through this table.”
Samael tilted his head back, gauging me. “Not like I have much of a choice, eh?”
“None at all,” I agreed. “Tell me about Vincent Blackburn.”
“Confused. Lots of teen angst. Lousy lay,” he said. His lips twitched. Despite my threats and his shackles, he still had control and he knew it. Bastard.
Being were never helps in these situations. You can’t beat the crap out of someone without lawsuits flying. Enhanced senses wouldn’t tell me anything except that Samael really needed a shower.
“We finished? There’s this reality program on at seven that I’m really into.”
Oh, it was so almost worth the legal entanglements to just hit him. Well, they hadn’t given me the detective shield to help me accessorize. And after a former life as a cocktail waitress and a runaway teenager, I at least knew how to read people.
“How about this,” I suggested to Samael in a cheery tone. “You cooperate with me, or I’ll have you transferred out of this nice, normal jail full